Digital Ads Reporting: Deliver More Effective Campaigns and Ditch Manual Reporting

Before we launch a new product or feature at Vendasta, a lot of research is completed— some of the most important questions being: will this be valued by our customers? Will it meet a need or solve a problem?

Before we launched Advertising Intelligence, we asked our partners those exact questions (and more, of course). We learned that over 85% of the partners we surveyed were already selling digital ads in house, and the majority of these partners were still reporting manually on their digital ads.

With this information in hand, we identified a gap in our Vendasta offering; how could we better serve these partners who are running digital ads? How can we help them deliver more effective ad campaigns for their clients, making them the local digital advertising expert? And how could we save them time on their reporting? It was from these questions that Advertising Intelligence was born in August 2018.

Advertising Intelligence is a freemium digital ad reporting tool that brings Google Ads and Facebook Ads all under one roof. With the product and the Advanced Reporting add-on, you have the ability to compare campaigns, discover trends, and automate your reporting. Advertising Intelligence is extremely straight-forward, easy to understand, and simple to use. While it’s easy to get stuck digging through analytics with other digital ads reporting platforms, Advertising Intelligence delivers the most important information in a user-friendly way. I’ve been interviewing and working with partners on Advertising Intelligence since its launch, and I have witnessed first-hand how our partners love the ease of use and straightforward manner of this product.

In order to validate our assumptions that the product would meet our partners’ needs and help them deliver more effective ad campaigns, we wanted to find out if we achieved product-market fit. Product-market fit means that your product meets real customer needs and does so in a way that is better than the alternatives (Olsen, 2018). One of the main factors to consider whether a product has achieved product-market fit is whether at least 40% of your customers should be very disappointed if they could no longer use your product (Vohra, 2018). In order to gather data from our partners to determine whether we achieved product-market fit, we set up a survey within the Advertising Intelligence product. We asked our partners three questions; one as a multiple choice response and the remainder as optional written feedback. It looked a little something like this:

1. We are looking for some quick feedback: How would you feel if you could no longer use Advertising Intelligence?
   a.  Very disappointed
   b.  Somewhat disappointed
   c.  Not disappointed
2. What is the main benefit you receive from using Advertising Intelligence?
   
3. Lastly, how can we improve Advertising Intelligence for you?

Our main goal was to have as many partners as possible answer the first question so we could gather as much data as possible. The other two feedback questions were added bonuses for us if the partner was willing to provide more detailed feedback. In total, we had 68 Partners respond to this survey (which excludes users that haven’t engaged with the product in at least two weeks) and the results were fantastic. They showed us that 55.7% of our partners said they would be “very disappointed” if they could no longer use Advertising Intelligence - well above the 40% mark, pointing us in the direction of good product-market fit.
Since we have taken the time to make sure that the product we created meets the needs that we intended it to, we are now able to continue planning the growth of the product (using feedback from our partners, of course). We’re excited to continue to work with our partners on the adoption of Advertising Intelligence!